Are pilots being slogged with disregard to their health, fitness to fly and passenger safety? Here is a real pilot’s schedule with an Indian carrier: Take off from Delhi at 8.15 am for Amritsar, land at Amritsar at 9.30 am, take off from Amritsar at 10.10 am for Delhi, land at Delhi at 11.30 am, take off for Bangkok from Delhi at 1.55 pm, land in Bangkok at 6.25 pm (IST), take off from Bangkok for Mumbai at 1.45 pm the next day, land in Mumbai at 6.25 pm, take off from Mumbai for Chennai at 8.50 pm, land at 10.55 pm, next day take off for Delhi, his home base, at 6.20 pm and land at 9.15 pm. This is a very testing schedule, especially if you consider how tiring flying is. If you have flown, you’ll know just how tired you get after a flight. Now imagine taking several of them on the trot.
It is over this nature of scheduling that the pilot fraternity is at loggerheads with the management teams of airlines, saying they are fatigued. They complain that airlines are extracting more work out of them as they expand their fleet, without recruiting enough new pilots. “The airlines are mismanaging resources and always maintain that the flying a pilot does is within the stipulated duty hours,” said a senior pilot on condition of anonymity.
The problem with this scheduling is that while technically it is within the Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) — binding rules for safe operations of an aircraft that state the number of hours a pilot needs to fly, the rest period, and so on — the airlines have found a way around them. Even though the rules are written in black and white under the Aircraft Rules of 1937 and Civil Aviation Requirements (CAR) are also governed by international conventions through agencies like the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), airlines in India are being allowed ‘exemptions’ to the CAR (see table), specifically Section 4-4.2, which allows the regulator to make exemptions in exceptional circumstances to these regulations, on the basis of the risk assessment provided by the operator.
The country’s civil aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has allowed airlines to use this as an operating norm. A Delhi High Court order of April 18 asked the airlines and the DGCA to pull a plug on this practice, citing five recent incidents that have resulted in both loss of life and aircraft, as result of fatigue arising out of constant flying.
Activist Yeshwant Shenoy, who filed the PIL, says the court has acknowledged that the whole exercise is driven by a profit motive and this profit motive of the airlines is endangering people’s lives. “The airlines have been manipulating CAR for maximum duty hours and minimum rest period. They use variations to increase the duty hours and thereby are breaking rules.”
25/04/18 Financial Express
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It is over this nature of scheduling that the pilot fraternity is at loggerheads with the management teams of airlines, saying they are fatigued. They complain that airlines are extracting more work out of them as they expand their fleet, without recruiting enough new pilots. “The airlines are mismanaging resources and always maintain that the flying a pilot does is within the stipulated duty hours,” said a senior pilot on condition of anonymity.
The problem with this scheduling is that while technically it is within the Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) — binding rules for safe operations of an aircraft that state the number of hours a pilot needs to fly, the rest period, and so on — the airlines have found a way around them. Even though the rules are written in black and white under the Aircraft Rules of 1937 and Civil Aviation Requirements (CAR) are also governed by international conventions through agencies like the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), airlines in India are being allowed ‘exemptions’ to the CAR (see table), specifically Section 4-4.2, which allows the regulator to make exemptions in exceptional circumstances to these regulations, on the basis of the risk assessment provided by the operator.
The country’s civil aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has allowed airlines to use this as an operating norm. A Delhi High Court order of April 18 asked the airlines and the DGCA to pull a plug on this practice, citing five recent incidents that have resulted in both loss of life and aircraft, as result of fatigue arising out of constant flying.
Activist Yeshwant Shenoy, who filed the PIL, says the court has acknowledged that the whole exercise is driven by a profit motive and this profit motive of the airlines is endangering people’s lives. “The airlines have been manipulating CAR for maximum duty hours and minimum rest period. They use variations to increase the duty hours and thereby are breaking rules.”
25/04/18 Financial Express
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